Warp

Traveling at Warp speed is a method to quickly complete both Away Missions and Ship Battles.

Any regular mission that has been "three-starred" can be completed using Warp. Cadet Challenges and Expedition Event missions are excluded from this. Away Missions are three-starred as soon as all rare rewards for a level have been collected. To three-star Ship Battles, the battle must be won in under 20 seconds.

To be able to travel at Warp at all, the player must be at least VIP 1. From VIP 3 onwards, the player can travel up to Warp 10, completing multiple runs of the same mission at once. One exception is that even players without VIP can travel at Warp 1 from time to time, by watching a short video. In this case, the mission will not cost any Chronitons.

Pros and Cons
Traveling at Warp has certain effects, some of which are advantageous - but it also comes at a cost.

Advantages

 * Saving a considerable amount of time, by not only skipping the whole mission walkthrough/battle, but also skipping the traveling animation to the location the mission takes place.
 * Quickly dump batches of US$crn into a mission, to speed up the collection of items that are needed a lot, such as Clothing Pattern.
 * The player will always receive the full (repeat-) Captain XP reward for that mission.
 * For Away Missions, the path yielding the most rewards will be chosen automatically, including missions with a 4-reward-path. Locked nodes are no longer relevant.
 * It is not possible to unintenionally reduce the rewards by accidentally failing a node or missing a reward node - or completely failing the mission.
 * Missions will always succeed.
 * Difficult Away Missions can still be completed, even if the necessary crew is currently on a shuttle mission.
 * (Reduced) Crew XP will be received in the form of Crew Experience Training tokens, which can be collected, instead of using it directly on the away team/ship crew.
 * Drop rates of items stay the same when using Warp.
 * The player will stay at the location he started off at, so a Warp sequence can be considered as: warping to the mission location, completing the mission, warping back.

Disadvantages

 * The US$crd rewards for Warp speed missions will be reduced to 70%, independent of the Warp factor.
 * The Crew XP for Warp speed missions will be reduced to 70%, independent of the Warp factor. This applies to all away missions, and assumes a 3-team crew for ship battles. For non-warp battles with teams of 2 or 4, this factor is different, see the table below. Note the amount received when using Warp is not influenced by the ship you have currently active.

How to interpret these values?
For Away Missions, the amount will always be 70% (usually rounded to the nearest possible Crew Experience Training distribution, but for some missions off by a few 10s or more). Note that for difficult missions/levels, this can mean "losing" about 70-90 XP points per warp mission.

For Ship Battles, it depends on your best available ship. If you don't have any 3- or 4-crew ships, you can actually benefit from using Warp, as you will receive 105% XP as opposed to completing the battle manually (you will still receive only 70% Credits, though). However, if you have a 4-crew ship available, using Warp will give you only about one half of the XP you would receive if you completed the mission manually. So especially for high cost (=high yield) missions, it will always be worth to actually play out the battle, giving you 150-200 XP points more.